Trump ‘plays Russia’s game’ with NATO attacks, former officials say

President Donald Trump’s threats to break with NATO are doing real damage to the United States’ most crucial military alliance, former defense and diplomatic officials who worked in Democratic and Republican administrations warned Thursday — saying they may only embolden Russia.

Trump upended this week’s NATO summit in Brussels by threatening that the United States might “go our own way” if NATO allies don’t dramatically boost their military spending.

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While European leaders will probably dismiss those words as mere bluster — especially as the U.S. beefs up its military presence — the former officials said Trump is fraying the common bond that undergirds the alliance President Harry Truman established at the dawn of the Cold War.

“Words still count,” said Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO and worked on the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Especially when those words come from the leader of the United States, which will always be the leader of the alliance. When the president says things that are untrue, uninformed and appear designed to be disruptive, they have an impact."

Lute, who is studying NATO's futureat Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said the attack on alliance unity “erodes confidence in American leadership and strikes at the heart of NATO’s common interests, common values, common responsibilities. And it is especially unhelpful just days before he meets NATO's biggest competitor, Vladimir Putin of Russia."

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Indeed, others believe Trump's rhetoric strengthens the hand of Putin, whom Trump meets Monday in Helsinki. Russia's foreign policy, including its cyberattacks on the democratic process in Western countries and 2014 invasion of Ukraine, is widely believed to be focused on dividing — and therefore weakening — the resolve of the Western alliance.

“It plays Russia’s game of trying to weaken NATO,” former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta saidof Trump's remarks. “And that’s the last thing that the United States ought to be part of.”

Trump had previously questioned the utility of the alliance during his insurgent 2016 presidential campaign, at one point labeling the alliance “obsolete” and suggesting that he would review whether NATO nations have met their financial obligations when considering coming to their defense.

Only five NATO member nations have met their commitment to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024.

American presidents in both parties have long pressed NATO member states to up the ante on defense spending. But none have so publicly lambasted U.S. allies.

In a news conference Thursday, Trump contended he could withdraw from NATO without congressional approval, though he didn’t address questions about whether he indeed threatened to do so.

It was latest in a series of broadsides in which Trump has questioned the efficacy of the alliance, including singling out Germany earlier in the week for its economic ties with Russia.

“What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy?” Trump tweeted.

He further roiled the summit Wednesday by suggesting that members increase their spending to 4 percent of GDP, double the current goal and largely considered impractical by experts.

“I thought the better approach for the president would be to go in, take credit for getting these members to increase their donation and then support the efforts to try to increase and strengthen our defense posture with NATO and basically declare victory,” Panetta said.

Trump's level of criticism of NATO countries has also clashed with members of his own party in Congress.

Before the summit, the Senate voted 97-2 on Tuesday to reaffirm U.S. support for NATO as part of annual defense policy legislation, even as several Republican senators also called on NATO members to boost their spending

The uncertainty Trump has created is different from anything NATO has faced before,said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

"Even at the height of previous crises ... the disputes were over policy, not over the fundamentals of the alliance," he said, citing disagreements over the Suez Canal, Vietnam and the Iraq War. "And once you begin questioning those fundamentals, the essence of alliance begins to erode, which could lead to its breakupmuch faster than people might think."

He called Trump's latest threat "deeply damaging for an alliance that rests in a fundamental sense on trust and confidence.”

Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis, who served as the top commander of NATO under Obama, said tension between the U.S. and other alliance members "has never been higher in my experience."

"While the message of encouraging higher defense spending by the Europeans is a sensible one," he said, "the style of the messenger will cause long-term degradation in alliance trust and confidence over time."

Still, Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill praised his aggressive push to convince NATO to share more of the military spending burden. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Trump’s “abrasive style” was a wake-up call to the alliance.

“We’ve got their attention,” Inhofe said. “I think he has effectively reasserted America as the leader of the free world, and people respect him and know they’re not just going to be mushy and get a handout from us.”

Lute agreed that "actions speak louder than words,"citing the fact that the United States has been rotating more military units into Eastern Europe on a regular basis as a deterrent to a more aggressive Russia and other measures.

"You see many indicators of U.S. commitment and even increased commitment," he said. "If anyone is responsible for the increased defense spending, it is Vladimir Putin."

Yet Trump's approach is undermining everything, Lute worries. "In the halls of NATO, this is very disturbing and disorienting."